Importing a diamond ring into Hong Kong

In this blog, you’ll learn just how much you can save by importing a diamond ring into HK and the answers to all the questions you might have about how to do it.

Is it worth importing an engagement ring into Hong Kong?

Many jewellery retailers in Hong Kong don’t publish diamond prices on their websites.

They would rather that you come into the store where they can baffle you with technical jargon and show you low quality diamonds that sparkle well under their expensive lights but won’t sparkle in regular daylight or the lights that you have in your home.

To show you just how much you could save though, we can compare a diamond ring on Chow Sang Sang with one of my recommended retailers, which is based in the US.

A 1 carat diamond ring with an 18k white gold setting is being sold for HK$58,500:

If we scroll down the page, you can see the quality of the diamond:

They tell us that this diamond has the following qualities:

• Carat: 1 carat
• Colour grade: J
• Clarity Grade VS2

There are two things to note with this information.

1. This diamond is likely to appear yellow

Diamond colour is graded on an alphabetical scale, starting at D (the whitest) all the way to Z (the yellowest).

When choosing a diamond, if you want your diamond to look white, my recommendation is to choose a diamond between D and H:

H is actually a great choice as it offers significantly more value, which still looking perfectly white once set into a ring.

This diamond has been graded J for colour:

It’s likely that most people will be able to pick up ‘warmer’ tones with this diamond, and it’s not one that I would usually recommend.

However, for the purpose of this comparison, it’s the diamond that we’ll use.

2. Chow Sang Sang has not included the ‘cut’ quality grade

Cut quality is the thing that makes a diamond sparkle.

It’s an assessment of the proportions of a diamond and you should ensure that your diamond has been graded ‘excellent’ for cut so that it reflects as much light as possible like the diamond on the right:

Choosing a diamond that has been graded lower than ‘excellent’ means that it will not reflect light back to your eyes and will look dull.

For this reason, it’s vitally important that you know what cut grade the diamond you are buying is – you should be aiming for ‘excellent’ or ‘ideal’.

But instead of telling us what the cut grade of the diamond is, in their online description Chow Sang Sang have just told us what the shape of the diamond is:

This is useless information and doesn’t help us understand its quality.

Luckily they have supplied the GIA grading report number and we can use this to find the diamond’s cut grade online. The GIA’s website tells us that this stone has only been graded ‘Very Good’ for cut quality:

This is another reason that I would not recommend this stone. But for the sake of comparison, we will continue to use it.

Importing a similar diamond to Hong Kong

The stone that we are comparing has got the following characteristics:

• 1 carat
• Very Good cut
• J colour
• VS2 Clarity
• GIA grading report

As a reminder, the price on Chow Sang Sang is: HK$58,500.

Looking James Allen, one of my recommended retailers, a diamond of the exact same quality can be purchased from just HK$27,000:

You can check today’s prices for diamonds here.

We’ll obviously need a ring setting for this diamond too.

Adding an 18k white gold solitaire setting brings the total cost to HK$32,452:

At HK$32,452, this is a saving of HK$25,048 over the Chow Sang Sang price of HK$58,500:

That’s a huge 43%!

You could either save this money, or alternatively put it towards getting a better quality diamond or a bigger stone.

What you shouldn’t do is spend that much on a poor quality diamond.